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Salla Tykka
Salla Tykka is an artist from Finland whose work I first saw at the Tramway in Glasgow a few years ago. As I write this one of her short films, Lasso, is on show in Edinburgh, as part of the Fruitmarket‘s group exhibition Print the Legend. It’s one of my favourite things in the exhibition, which is a collection of contemporary art inspired by the iconography of Hollywood Westerns (there’s work by Gillian Wearing and Douglas Gordon in it too).
Not much happens in Lasso. A girl goes round to a boy’s house in an ordinary European suburb and rings the bell. When he doesn’t answer it, she goes round the back of the house to look through the window. Gazing in through the blinds, she sees him with his shirt off, jumping through a lasso again and again, working himself up into a sweat-drenched frenzy, until finally he collapses on the floor. As she watches him, she starts crying. Then the camera slowly pans away from the house; the final shot is a close-up of snow on the grass. The whole thing is soundtracked by Ennio Morricone’s stirring theme music from Once Upon A Time In The West. The effect is mesmerising, and enigmatic, and erotic, and beautiful, and very moving. Why is she crying? Is she in love? Is it just the overwhelming power of the moment? I think I maybe love the film because it has the same impact as a really evocative song (and is about the same length). It offers a powerful image, but leaves it to you to fill in the gaps and decide the meaning for yourself.
Salla’s website only has a trailer for Lasso, but someone has sneaked the whole film on to YouTube here. Go to the website anyway, though, because there’s some beautiful photography there too, as well as trailers for some of Salla’s other films, which you can probably track down on YouTube too.
Andrew
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